Tag: Festival of Fantastic Films

Tut tut, I neglected to mention here that the two episodes of our series In Conversation With filmed in Manchester last October are now both available to view on YouTube: Jenny Hanley and Jonathan Rigby. Chrissie and I hope to shoot the fourth episode next weekend.

Went up to Manchester yesterday, to interview Jenny Hanley and Jonathan Rigby for the 28th Festival of Fantastic Films. Both guests and audience seemed to have a great time, and my conversation with Jenny was recorded for use in a future issue of the The Dark Side. The photographs above were taken by Chrissie Harper. (No, I wasn’t kneeling next to Jonathan; he’s just really tall.)

Rose of Eibon’s YouTube channel has been further updated to include my first three appearances on Made In Birmingham TV, successor to Big Centre TV. These comprise interviews with actress Edith Scob (12 November), movie director Norman J Warren (3 December) and film-maker turned festival organiser Marc Hamill (10 December). An extended version of the last of these is currently in the works.

Further to my attending last month’s Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester to conduct Dagmar Lassander’s guest interview, I’ve now been approached by Pan Macmillan to interview Adam Nevill at a Waterstones promotion for his forthcoming novel, Under a Watchful Eye. If all goes according to plan, the event will be held in the centre of Birmingham, Adam’s former home city.

Update 21/11: Unfortunately, it appears Adam’s schedule is rather over-loaded, so the event has been cancelled.

As well as interviewing Dagmar Lassander on stage for the 27th Festival of Fantastic Films, my somewhat hectic Saturday schedule included a short chat with Edith Scob, whose haunting performance was central to 1960’s Les Yeux Sans Visage (known here as Eyes Without a Face). It’s currently at the editing stage, but should be available soon at my and Chrissie’s YouTube channel.

Update: The interview was screened on the cable channel Made In Birmingham TV (formerly Big Centre TV) on 12 November.

I had the immense pleasure yesterday of interviewing German actress Dagmar Lassander (The Frightened Woman, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, The Black Cat) on stage at the 27th Festival of Fantastic Films, as well as presenting her with the Society of Fantastic Films International Award, a rather lovely statuette modelled upon the robot Maria from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Our conversation is earmarked for publication in a future edition of The Dark Side, with the footage appearing later on Ghostwords TV (alongside other interviews filmed that afternoon by my colleague Chrissie Harper).

In the meantime, Big Centre TV will be airing an extract of my recent chat with FrightFest’s Alan Jones tomorrow as part of its breakfast show Good Morning, with repeats during the day’s news programming.

Delighted to announce I’ve been invited to interview the actress and director Dagmar Lassander next Saturday for the 27th Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester. I already had two reasons to be in the city that day: Chrissie and I will be interviewing attendees for a Ghostwords TV documentary on the event, plus we’re catching John Carpenter during his brief UK concert tour. The Dark Side has expressed interest in publishing my conversation with Ms Lassander, which is a bonus.

There’s a little story behind this article (which unaccountably appeared without a byline, although I did receive a credit for the reviews of Satan’s Slave and Terror published in the same issue). I’d interviewed Norman at the 1997 Festival of Fantastic Films, but during the closing ceremony, whilst I was on stage with John Landis, some unknown scumbag sneaked into the main hall and stole the bag containing both my camera (with irreplaceable photos of myself with my new god-daughter, Heloise) and my tape recorder. Fortunately, Norman was agreeable to recreating our conversation via telephone, and my late wife Ann generously offered to transcribe the result.

Bringing the story forward to the present day, Norman is actually working on a new movie and has agreed to discuss this project on a forthcoming edition of Ghostwords TV.

Here’s a nice photo of the actress Valerie Leon and myself at the 1996 Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester. She’s reportedly busy filming a new horror comedy, Pitfire of Hell, co-starring fellow scream queen Ellie Church, directed and co-written by Bob East. Ms Leon is 5’11” tall, by the way, and I’m pretty sure she was wearing high heels.

I’ve been looking through a few of my photo albums and it struck me it might be nice to dust a few of the pictures off for a wider audience. The two below were taken at Manchester’s Festival of Fantastic Films in 1995, when the guests also included directors Roger Corman (whose Gas-s-s-s and The Trip are about to be released on R2 Blu-ray by Signal One), Robin Hardy (The Wicker Man) and Norman J Warren (an old friend, whose canon includes Satan’s Slave and Inseminoid).

Anyway, here’s a rather nice snap of myself with Hammer scream queen Barbara Shelley, who rather curiously — albeit charmingly — thought we already knew each other. Perhaps she mistook me for one of the Martian bugs she’d encountered in Quatermass and the Pit.

Oddly enough, Ms Shelley wasn’t the only actress present who’d had to fight off an invasion from the Red Planet, since we were joined by Ann Robinson, who apparently quit showbiz after The War of the Worlds in order to marry a matador (although she had a brief cameo alongside original co-star Gene Barry in the Spielberg remake).